Friday, February 03, 2006

The Cartoon Controversy

This just keeps getting more interesting. Who knew that a dozen cartoons, cartoons for God's sake, would cause so much anger and waste so much internet bandwidth.

My contribution to byte wasting is an update on this furor. Michelle Malkin has a great roundup. And of course a new blog has been dedicated to this bizarre controversy. A sample:

It is suddenly coming to our attention that Islam is not, cannot, and will not be integrated or assimilated to the values of freedom and democracy. Islam is not only a religion; it is a totalitarian and expansionistic political ideology.

It is now a moment of truth. The current events unfolding all over the world are opening our eyes. 12 cartoons have touched the soul of the free societies: The right to speak freely without fear.

And Gateway Pundit shows that this ruckus may all be due to false propaganda:

The organisation Islamic Society in Denmark toured the Middle-East to create awareness about the cartoons, bringing 3 additional images, which HAD NEVER been published in any media source.

The three additional images truely are offensive, as well as amatuerish. Just as in the Koran flushing fish story, can this be yet another example of Muslims themselves desectrating Islam in order to generate anti-western publicity?

Just as the false promises of socialism and communism were found to lead to misery instead of happiness; poverty instead of wealth; enslavement instead of freedom--so too, have multiculturalism and political correctness, instead of harmony, brought lethal discord.

It's ironic that simple cartoons may be the catalyst that opens the world's eyes to the dangers of appeasing radical Islam.

Ever since that seminal death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie by the Iranian theocracy, the Western world has incrementally and insidiously accepted these laws of asymmetry. Perhaps due to what might legitimately be called the lunacy principle ("these people are capable of doing anything at anytime"), the Muslim Middle East can insist on one standard of behavior for itself and quite another for others. It asks nothing of its own people and everything of everyone else's, while expecting no serious repercussions in the age of political correctness, in which affluent and leisured Westerners are frantic to avoid any disruption in their rather sheltered lives.